The state of South Carolina is suing Purdue Pharma over its alleged contributions to the opioid epidemic.

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson announced the lawsuit at a press conference on Tuesday. It accuses the Connecticut-based company of deceptive marketing practices and downplaying the addictive qualities of OxyContin.

In particular, the suit addresses Purdue Pharma’s failure to comply with the state’s Unfair Trade Practices Act. In 2007, Purdue Pharma signed an agreement with South Carolina and other states, which required the company to correct its marketing practices.

However, according to Wilson, Purdue Pharma continued to encourage doctors to prescribe OxyContin for unapproved uses. Representatives also assured doctors that the users would become only “pseudoaddicted.” Supposedly, they could reverse their symptoms by taking even more drugs.

In reality, OxyContin is a Schedule II controlled substance, which means it is highly addictive.

“Opioid addiction is a public health menace to South Carolina,” Wilson said at the press conference. “We cannot let history record that we stood by while this epidemic rages.” Recovering addicts and family members of overdose victims stood around him.

“While we vigorously deny the allegations,” a Purdue Pharma spokesperson said in a statement, “we share South Carolina officials’ concerns about the opioid crisis and we are committed to working collaboratively to find solutions.”

Over 565 South Carolinians died of opioid overdoses in 2015. Last year, the state had the ninth-highest opioid prescribing rate in the country.

Comparatively, the U.S. as a whole had over 33,000 people die from opioid use in 2015. Experts predict that number will rise.

This is not the first legal action against Purdue Pharma. In January, the city of Everett, Washington. sued the company for negligence and inaction over the city’s OxyContin crisis. Six months later, the state of Ohio sued Purdue Pharma and four other companies over their marketing of OxyContin and other drugs.

Most recently, New Hampshire filed its own lawsuit on August 1. Like South Carolina, the state accuses Purdue Pharma of overstating the benefits of opioids and recommending it for unapproved uses.

In a similar action, the Cherokee Nation sued six pharmaceutical companies in April, accusing them of unjustly profiting from over-prescription of opioids.

Last week, President Trump declared the opioid epidemic a national emergency. Since then, he has not specified any plans or resources to combat the crisis.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

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A federal judge ruled on Wednesday in favor of one more search for Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

D.C. District Judge Amit Mehta ordered the State Department to search its servers for emails related to the 2012 Benghazi attack. In particular, they are tasked with looking for anything Clinton sent to aides Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, or Jake Sullivan at their state.gov addresses.

“Secretary Clinton used a private email server, located in her home, to transmit and receive work-related communications during her tenure as secretary of state,” Judge Mehta noted in his ruling. “[State] has not, however, searched the one records system over which it has always had control and that is almost certain to contain some responsive records: the state.gov email server.”

The ruling comes after the watchdog group Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit calling for a renewed search. The group argued that the State Department had only searched outside sources, such as Clinton’s private server.

Lawyers for the department countered that an additional search is unlikely to turn up anything else. In addition, it would set a poor precedent for any future requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Judge Mehta responded that “this matter is a far cry from a typical FOIA case” and that the email scandal was “a specific fact pattern unlikely to arise in the future.”

He then ordered the department to give him a status report by September 22.

Previously, Clinton and her three aides surrendered more than 30,000 emails to the agency in 2014. The investigation found 348 emails relating to Benghazi sent to or from the then-Secretary of State.

Any emails she deleted off her private server, however, may not have a backup and are likely gone forever.

In contrast, as a government agency, the State Department would have server backups in place. Department officials, though, have admitted that there was no automated archiving system in place during Clinton’s tenure.

The State Department did not comment on the ruling. Tom Fitton, president of the Judicial Watch, said in a statement, “This major court ruling may finally result in more answers about the Benghazi scandal–and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in it–as we approach the attack’s fifth anniversary.”

Clinton cites the “emailgate“controversy and then-FBI director James Comey’s subsequent investigation as major reasons why she lost the 2016 presidential election.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

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The owner of an Atlanta gym wants the world to know that police aren’t welcome at his business.

Recently, Jim Chambers posted a sign on the front door of the EAV Barbell Club explaining the gym’s rules. The sign is clearly visible from the street and reads, “Do whatever the hell you want, correctly, except crossfit cultism. No f—–g cops.”

According to Chambers, although the sign went up a couple weeks ago, he has enforced this policy since the gym opened. He also does not give memberships to active members of the military.

Former law enforcement and military members, however, are welcome to join.

In an interview with Reuters, Chambers explained that most of his clients are minorities and/or members of the LGBT community. Many of them would be uncomfortable working out alongside law enforcement because police officers had harassed them in the past.

“We know statistically that those people are at risk around police in America,” Chambers said. “I had members who joined because of the policy: they saw it on the door and thought, ‘Oh, that’s cool,’ and joined.”

He has since removed the vulgar sign but plans to put up another without the expletives.

The Atlanta Police Department has not released an official statement about the policy. However, a representative told local news station WXIA, “Were we to respond to an emergency there, this sign would not stop us from lawfully doing our job.”

Chambers doesn’t mind. “If they have a warrant, they can go anywhere they want, but we’re not breaking the law,” he said.

He also noted that, as someone who describes himself as “somewhere between an eco-anarchist and a Marxist-Leninist,” he would not be likely to call the police in the first place.

WXIA reached out to a team of lawyers about the legality of the policy. They agreed that federal anti-discrimination laws do not protect law enforcement as a separate group. The courts could decide if the policy is discriminatory, but for now, it remains legal.

Since the story broke on Tuesday, mixed reactions have been pouring in on social media. The gym’s Facebook page currently has a 1.4 rating and over 2,000 one-star reviews.

Atlanta Gym Owner Puts Up Sign, ‘No F—ing Cops’ – Tells Reporters: No Veterans Either https://t.co/KUGJQNMsCt
Wow
Why would anyone go there?

— Truckster1 (@truckster1) August 9, 2017

Atlanta gym owner you're doing amazing sweetie https://t.co/sLUzClmBkc

— reggie (@1942bs) August 9, 2017

Atlanta gym bans Cops from joining.

It’s their right. And it’s our right not to join & to protest outside the gym. https://t.co/l7BmVeYzV8

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) August 9, 2017

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Atlanta Gym Bans Police and Active Military Members appeared first on Law Street.

Three victims of the CIA’s torture program have filed a lawsuit against the program’s two creators. On Monday, a Washington judge ruled that the case can go to trial.

The plaintiffs in this suit are Suleiman Abdullah Salim of Tanzania; Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud of Libya; and the estate of Gul Rhaman of Afghanistan. All three were detainees in a CIA prison in 2003. The first two are now free and living in their home countries. The third died in prison.

The defendants are James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, former U.S. military psychologists who designed the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” in November 2001. Reportedly, the government paid them between $75 and $81 million for their plans.

This is the first CIA torture lawsuit to survive past the pretrial discovery phase. Prior to this, the Bush and Obama Administrations intervened, arguing that the suits put state secrets at risk.

However, a Senate intelligence committee report published in 2014 provided many details that the administrations had tried to keep secret. It confirmed that the CIA tortured 39 people, including the plaintiffs, at a secret prison codenamed “Cobalt.”

According to the report, Salim and Ben Soud’s torture included beatings, sleep deprivation, shackling in stress positions, and waterboarding. In addition, Rhaman died of hypothermia after his interrogators doused him with water and left him in a freezing room overnight.

In a pretrial hearing on July 28, the defense attorneys argued that providing a memo to the CIA does not count as aiding and abetting torture. It was the U.S. government, not Mitchell and Jessen, who conducted the program.

At one point, the defense team compared their clients to the manufacturers who developed the gas used in Nazi execution chambers. The British military tribunal, the lawyers pointed out, did not try those manufacturers for what the Nazis did.

Judge Justin Quackenbush rejected those arguments, ruling that the evidence indicated that Mitchell and Jessen themselves supported using torture on the CIA prisoners. Not only that, he found it “undisputed” that the psychologists used the techniques themselves on the CIA’s first detainee, Abu Zubaydah. Jessen was “physically involved” in Rhaman’s torture as well.

“Defendants have not established they merely acted at the direction of the government, within the scope of their authority, and that such authority was legally and validly conferred,” he decided.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) first filed the suit on behalf of the three plaintiffs in 2015.

“The court’s ruling means that for the first time, individuals responsible for the brutal and unlawful CIA torture program will face meaningful legal accountability for what they did,” ACLU attorney Dror Ladin told the Guardian. “Our clients have waited a long time for justice.”

The trial will begin on September 5.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

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The parents of 12-year-old Mallory Grossman are suing her school district in the wake of her suicide in June. They believe that the school was negligent when it ignored allegations that Mallory’s classmates were cyberbullying her.

According to the suit, Mallory’s classmates at Copeland Middle School had been bullying her since October of last year. She told her parents right away. After that, Seth and Dianne Grossman approached administrators of the Rockaway Township School District on a monthly basis, trying to speak to someone about their daughter’s ordeal.

However, although the administrators told them that the school was investigating the matter, they ultimately dismissed the parents’ concerns.

“I‘m going to make the assumption that the school did something, but I’m also going to make the assumption, based on where we are today, that they didn’t do enough,” Mrs. Grossman told NBC News.

According to Bruce Nagel, the family’s attorney, the classmates’ cruel messages were the cause of Mallory’s death. “There were texts, there was Snapchat, there was Instagram, for months she was told she’s a loser, she had no friends and finally she was even told, ‘Why don’t you kill yourself?’,” he said in a statement.

Photos accompanying at least two of the malicious Instagram posts were taken on school grounds. Nagel’s office has not yet released or independently verified the texts.

Mallory’s classmates also allegedly bullied her in person, giving her “dirty looks” and excluding her from their lunch table.

In response to the torment, Mallory’s grades dropped from As and Bs to Cs and Ds. She complained of headaches and stomachaches to get out of going to school.

At one point, the school met with the parents to discuss Mallory’s failing grades. However, Mrs. Grossman claims that “they were not at that time concerned with her emotional well being.”

Hours before Mallory took her own life on June 14, Mrs. Grossman appealed directly to the mother of one of the bullies. “I can tell you that the mother dismissed it, said it was just a big joke and that I really shouldn’t worry about it,” she said. “Even after I asked her daughter to please stop texting Mallory, three minutes later a text message — a series of text messages — came through from that child.”

Nagel claims that he has identified “three or four” of Mallory’s bullies. He also said that the Grossmans are considering bringing legal action against the bullies’ families.

On Wednesday, Rockaway Township Superintendent Greg McGann released a statement on the school district’s website.

Because the case is still under investigation by the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office, and also the subject of a tort claim, under the advice of legal counsel, The Rockaway Township School District cannot discuss this case in public or with media. The teachers, staff and administrators within the Rockaway Township School District are, as they have always been, and will continue to be, committed to protecting the rights and safety for all our students.

Last year, the district released a self-assessment report on how it dealt with bullies. Copeland Middle School received a 74 out of 78.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Despite encouraging their children to buckle up, many adults are not following their own advice.

A new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found that 91 percent of adults wear their seat belts in the driver or front passenger seats, but only 72 percent do in the rear seats. Moreover, only 57 percent use the belts in hired vehicles like taxis or ride sharing cars.

“When we asked people why they were less likely to buckle up, a quarter of the respondents told us that it’s safer in the back seat, so they don’t need to buckle up,” Jessica Jermakian, an IIHS senior research engineer, told CBS.

It’s true that in cars from the ’60s and ’70s, the back seat is generally the safest place. However, the belts, tensioners, airbags, and vehicle designs of the modern era remove any disadvantage the front seats once had. While experts still consider the rear seats to be somewhat safer, a seat belt is still necessary.

“Even if you’re in the back seat, the laws of physics are not suspended,” Jermakian warns. “You still need to buckle up in order to get the best protection in a crash.”

Crash test footage reveals that an unrestrained passenger in the back seat can slam against the front seats. That sort of collision could injure passengers anywhere in the vehicle.

In response to questions about ride sharing, four out of five adults explained that they don’t wear a seat belt because they are only traveling short distances.

“That statistic [about the risk of a crash] doesn’t change just because you’re in a ride share or a taxi,” said Jonathan Adkins, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association. “We need rear-seat passengers to understand that seat belts are critical for them, too.”

Every state except New Hampshire requires adults to wear seat belts in the front seat. Only 29 states have laws that extend to the back seat as well.

About half of all fatalities in car crashes each year could have been prevented if the victim had worn their seat belt. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that seat belts saved nearly 14,000 lives in 2015 alone.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Why Don’t Adults Wear Seat Belts in the Backseat? appeared first on Law Street.

On Wednesday, New York police arrested Nathaniel Glover, also known as Kidd Creole, for fatally stabbing a homeless man.

Surveillance footage shows the 57-year-old rapper getting into an argument with the victim on Tuesday, police told the New York Times. The altercation took place at around 11:50 p.m. at the intersection of East 44th Street and Third Avenue. TMZ reports that the victim used a “gay slur,” which caused Glover’s angry reaction. It is not clear if or how the two men knew each other before the argument.

As the fight escalated, Glover stabbed the victim multiple times in the torso. EMS took him to Bellevue Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The New York Daily News identifies the man as 55-year-old John Jolly. He lived in a homeless shelter in Lower Manhattan, about two miles from where Glover allegedly stabbed him. According to a police statement, he was a level two sex offender who served five years for beating and raping a 42-year-old woman in 1997. Jolly appeared to be drunk on the surveillance footage.

Glover, a Bronx native, works near the crime scene as a handyman and security guard. He confessed to the murder and told police that he was “extremely remorseful” for his actions.

He was charged with second-degree murder, which carries a maximum sentence of life without parole. There is no information on his lawyer as of yet.

“That is so sad, I’m really in shock right now,” Glover’s 72-year-old neighbor told the New York Daily News. “He was the sweetest man I’ve ever met. Everybody liked him, I’m really about to cry.”

Glover was one of the founding members of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, a hip hop group active during the 1980s. They reached mainstream fame with their 1982 single “The Message,” which reached Number 62 on the Billboard Top 100. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. They were the first hip hop group to reach that milestone.

The Furious Five was supposed to perform at the Dell Music Center in Philadelphia on August 20. Following Glover’s arrest, Live Nation removed the event from its concert listing. Neither the band nor the music center have commented on Glover’s arrest.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Rapper Kidd Creole Charged with Murder appeared first on Law Street.

A new Florida law allows residents to challenge any school textbook that they find inappropriate.

The legislation, which went into effect on July 1, is known as the Instructional Materials Bill. It permits any resident, regardless of whether or not they have a child in school, to challenge what Florida students are learning via an independent hearing. If the hearing officer deems the complaint justified, they can order the school to ban the book. However, school districts will still have the final say.

The Florida Citizens’ Alliance, a conservative group, pushed for the law after examining more than 60 textbooks in 2015. The group’s founder, Keith Flaugh, found more than 80 instances in one government textbook that he believes gives false information.

“We found [the textbooks] to be full of political indoctrination, religious indoctrination, revisionist history and distorting our founding values and principles, even a significant quantity of pornography,” he told NPR.

He goes on to explain the pornography is in literature within the school library or on summer reading lists.

While the bill can apply to any piece of required reading, the FCA’s main concern is with science textbooks. The group does not believe the schools should teach evolution or climate change as facts. One unnamed member claimed that the “vast majority of Americans believe that the world and the beings living on it were created by God as revealed in the Bible,” so the textbooks should only present evolution as a theory.

Similarly, an affidavit from a teacher complains that her school is teaching climate change as “reality.”

Other issues the FCA has with the books include attitudes toward Islam and anti-American portrayals of history.

In response to the bill, the Florida Citizens for Science Group posted a statement on its blog:

We believe that should this bill become law with the governor’s signature, people who crusade against basic, established science concepts such as evolution and climate change will have the green light to bog down the textbook selection process on the local level and bully school boards into compromises that will negatively impact science education.

Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, is also concerned. “It’s just the candor with which the backers of the bill have been saying, ‘Yeah, we’re going to go after evolution, we’re going to go after climate change,'” he said.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Florida Law Fights Against “Political Indoctrination” in School Textbooks appeared first on Law Street.

On July 7, the Canadian government formally apologized to Omar Khadr, one of Guantanamo Bay’s ex-detainees. Speaking at a press conference, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland confirmed that Khadr and the Canadian government had reached a financial settlement of $10.5 million. Khadr had filed a civil suit against the government in 2014 for conspiring with the U.S. to abuse his rights.

“We hope that this expression, and the negotiated settlement reached with the government, will assist him in his efforts to begin a new and hopeful chapter in his life with his fellow Canadians,” Goodale and Freeland said in their statement.

Speaking to CBC, Khadr said that he hopes the formal apology will restore his reputation, but is sorry if the settlement causes pain to the family of Sgt. Christopher Speer, the medic he allegedly killed in 2002.

Khadr is just one example of a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner struggling to reintegrate into society. Read on to learn the details of what it means to be a former Guantanimo Bay detainee.

Overview: The Detention Center and Its Numbers

Naval Station Guantanamo Bay is located on 45 square miles of land on a bay of the same name in Cuba. The U.S. leased it from Cuba in 1903, but it did not officially function as a detention center until the early ’90s, when it housed HIV-positive refugees fleeing a Haitian coup. Still, the base did not gain its negative reputation until after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The first U.S. prisoners of the War on Terror–20 Afghans–arrived on January 11, 2002. Since then, according to the New York Times‘ extensive database on Guantanamo, about 780 prisoners have been detained at the base. Of that number, around 730 were eventually released without charges. Many of those transferred had been held for years. There are currently 41 detainees still at Guantanamo.

Only seven of the remaining detainees have been formally charged with any sort of crime. Five have been approved for transfer to their home countries or third-party nations, but still remain at Guantanamo Bay. Most of the detainees have had dual citizenship, but over the course of the detention center’s history, the largest group of single-nationality War on Terror prisoners comes from Afghanistan. Of the 41 detainees remaining today, 16 come from Yemen, five come from Afghanistan, six from Pakistan, and eight from Saudi Arabia. The rest come from other Middle Eastern and African countries. There have been Russian prisoners on record as well, but the last one, Ravil Mingazov, was transferred to the United Arab Emirates in January.

Throughout the detention center’s history, 15 prisoners under the age of 18 have been detained. Nine prisoners died in custody, six of them suspected of suicide.

On his second day in office, former President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the detention center within one year, but due to widespread opposition, the facility has remained open. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, vowed on the campaign trail to “load it up with some real bad dudes.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions visited the base and detention center on July 7.

DNI Report on “Reengagement”

In 2016, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) released a report summarizing the status of certain recidivist ex-detainees–that is, former Guantanamo Bay prisoners suspected of returning to terrorism. Prior to January 15, 2016, 676 detainees had been transferred out of the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Of the transferred detainees, 118 were “confirmed” to have reengaged in terrorism. The Bush Administration had transferred 111 of the detainees while the Obama Administration transferred seven. According to the DNI report, 63 of the 118 were still at large, while the rest were either dead or in custody.

Concurrently, 86 of the transferred detainees–74 under the Bush Administration and 12 under the Obama Administration–were “suspected” of returning to terrorist activities. Sixty-five are at large, while the rest have been killed or captured. About 30 percent of the total number of ex-Guantanamo Bay detainees have reengaged in terrorism activities.

Case Study #1: Omar Khadr

Born in Canada in 1986, Khadr went with his family to Afghanistan and Pakistan when he was eight years old. In 2002, during a firefight with U.S. troops at a suspected Al-Qaeda compound, Khadr supposedly threw a grenade that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer. He was captured and sent to Guantanamo Bay, where he was treated as an adult prisoner despite being only 16. As a part of his torture, he was beaten, denied medical treatment, held in solitary confinement, and bound in “stress positions.” He also claims to have been used as a “human mop” when he urinated on himself.

Khadr was charged under the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and is the only Guantanamo captive so far charged with killing a U.S. soldier. He confessed to killing Speer in 2010 as part of a plea deal to get him transferred to a Canadian prison, but has since recanted, claiming that he has no memory of the firefight. He was released in 2015, two years after filing a lawsuit against the Canadian government. As per the conditions of his release, he was required to live with his lawyer, abide by nightly curfews, and wear a tracking bracelet.

In the wake of the government’s formal apology and settlement, Speer’s widow petitioned to have Khadr’s assets frozen so that he could be forced to pay a $134.1 million wrongful death judgment from a Utah court. A judge rejected the petition on July 13.

Case Study #2: Jamal al-Harith

Born Ronald Fiddler in Manchester, England in 1966, al-Harith converted to Islam while in college. In 2001, while on a backpacking trip in Pakistan, he paid a truck driver to take him to Iran. Taliban soldiers stopped the truck near the Afghan border and, seeing his British passport, jailed him as a spy. He was later rescued by American troops, but then sent off to Guantanamo Bay because of his “knowledge of prisoners and interrogation tactics.” He was held there without charges for two years, during which time he was beaten, starved, and deprived of sleep and adequate water.

Shortly after his release in 2004, al-Harith and 15 other ex-detainees sued the British government, claiming that it was aware of their treatment while in U.S. custody. In total, the ex-detainees received a $12.4 million out-of-court settlement. Al-Harith reportedly received around $1.2 million, but his wife later claimed that the payout was “substantially less.”

In 2014, al-Harith crossed into Syria and joined ISIS. His wife and children followed and unsuccessfully attempted to persuade him to return to the U.K. On February 19, 2017, he carried out a suicide bombing in Mosul, Iraq.

Case Study #3: Mustafa Ait Idir

Mustafa Ait Idir is one of the Algerian Six, a group of Algerian-born Bosnian citizens who were arrested in October 2001 for allegedly planning to bomb the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo. He was transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and remained there for the next seven years. While incarcerated, according to the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, he was subjected to a beating that partially paralyzed his face. On another occasion, the Initial Reaction Force (IRF) broke Ait Idir’s finger after he refused to give them his pants (as Muslim men must be clothed while praying). The soldiers did not allow him to receive medical treatment.

Shortly after the Algerian Six’s internment, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a habeas corpus petition on their behalf. The U.S. government rationalized that detainees at Guantanamo Bay were not protected under the Constitution because they were neither U.S. citizens nor located on U.S. territory (as Cuba still technically owns the land on which the naval base was built). The Algerian Six challenged that as co-plaintiffs in Boumediene v. Bush. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the right of habeas corpus review applies to the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay as well as U.S. citizens. Following a review of the Algerian Six’s cases files, District Judge Richard Leon ordered five of the detainees, including Ait Idir, to be released. Ait Idir returned to Bosnia.

On July 13, Ait Idir wrote an opinion piece for USA Today on his time spent on Guantanamo Bay in response to Sessions’ recent visit. His bio reveals that he is still in Bosnia, teaching computer science and living with his family. In his piece, he urges young Muslims not to turn to violence. “It is one thing to be upset, even enraged,” he writes, “it is another to be heartless. Neither Allah nor any god of any religion could ever support such cruelty to our fellow man.”

Conclusion

The three case studies listed above make up only a fraction of the detainees released from Guantanamo Bay. Many have returned to terrorist groups, while others are serving out the remainder of their sentences in other prisons. Some have been fully released, but are struggling to return to society.

Obama’s executive order to close the base is still on record, but the current administration has no plans to carry it out. If anything, Attorney General Sessions’ visit could be in preparation to send more “bad dudes” to the detention center. For now, though, Guantanamo Bay has taken a back seat to the health care vote and other priorities. The 41 prisoners still detained will remain where they are.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Guantanamo Bay’s Ex-Detainees: Where Are They Now? appeared first on Law Street.

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice filed an amicus brief stating that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not protect against employment discrimination based on sexuality.

The brief was in response to Donald Zarda’s lawsuit against his employer, a skydiving company called Altitude Express. Zarda believed that the company fired him in 2010 after he told a female customer that he was gay. According to trial documents, he did this so that the customer would not be uncomfortable that he was strapped so tightly to her.

Zarda died in 2014 in a skydiving accident. Two executors of his estate continued the lawsuit on his behalf. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is currently hearing the case.

The New York district court originally dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that Zarda could not file under Title VII because the act does not cover sexual orientation. The Justice Department’s brief encouraged the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the lower court’s ruling.

“The sole question here is whether, as a matter of law, Title VII reaches sexual orientation discrimination. It does not, as has been settled for decades. Any efforts to amend Title VII’s scope should be directed to Congress rather than the courts,” the brief says.

It goes on to add that since Congress never specified anything to do with sexual orientation in the act, the courts cannot act independently to change it.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The legislation does not specify the exact meaning of “sex.” However, “in common ordinary usage, the word means only ‘biologically male or female,'” the brief continues.

But the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in April that Title VII does protect sexuality. “It would require considerable calisthenics to remove the ‘sex’ from ‘sexual orientation,'” Chief Judge Diane Wood wrote.

James Esseks, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT and HIV Project, said in a statement that he was relieved that the courts could interpret the Civil Rights Act, rather than Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the rest of the Trump Administration.

“We are confident that the courts will side with equality and the people,” he concluded.

The Justice Department filed the brief the same day that President Donald Trump tweeted his ban on transgender service people in the military.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post DOJ: Civil Rights Act Does Not Apply to LGBT Discrimination appeared first on Law Street.

On Monday, the National Archives released 3,810 documents pertaining to the John F. Kennedy assassination to the public.

According to the administration’s press release, the records originate from the FBI and CIA investigations into the assassination–441 documents previously withheld in full and 3,369 documents previously released with portions redacted.

Notably, the release includes 17 audio interviews with Yuri Nosenko, an ex-KGB officer who had information on Lee Harvey Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union. The release also contains records relating to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, which took place five years after Kennedy was killed.

The National Archives is unsealing the documents as a result of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The legislation passed in response to the 1991 film “JFK,” which painted the assassination as a governmental conspiracy. Under the act, the National Archives was ordered to put all Kennedy assassination records in one collection that would be fully accessible within 25 years.

The entire collection consists of approximately five million records, 88 percent of which have been available to the public since the late ’90s. However, thousands of documents remain totally under seal, along with tens of thousands of pages that have been only partially unsealed.

Many of the documents released this week were deemed too dangerous to unseal back in the ’90s, as the classified information could have compromised American spies and confidential informants. Now, most of those agents have presumably passed away.

The 25-year deadline for releasing the full collection is on Oct. 26, 2017. Under the terms of the Records Collection Act, only one person can block the release: the sitting president, and only if he presents proof in writing that the records would threaten national security.

President Trump, who previously accused Senator Ted Cruz’s father of being in league with Oswald, has roughly three months to decide if he will block the remaining records or not. In April, an anonymous White House staffer told Politico that the administration “is familiar with the requirements” and is working to “enable a smooth process in anticipation of the October deadline.”

The newly-released materials are currently only available online, and access to the complete unsealed paper collection will be available at an unspecified later date. Once released, the National Archives will store all the Kennedy assassination documents onsite in College Park, Maryland, where the collection will be open to the public for viewing.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Starting August 1, Wisconsin technology company Three Square Market will inject microchips between its employees’ thumbs and index fingers. The program is not mandatory, but so far, more than 50 of the 80 employees at the company’s River Falls headquarters have volunteered.

The microchips are about the size of a grain of rice. They use radio frequency identification technology (RFID), which the Food and Drug Administration approved for human use in 2004. Once an employee gets a chip, they will be able to access the building, pay for items, and log in to computers with a wave of the hand.

The procedure is reportedly quick, painless, and free to volunteers–the company will pick up the $300 tab per procedure.

“Eventually, this technology will become standardized, allowing you to use this as your passport, public transit, all purchasing opportunities, etc.,” said Three Square Market CEO Todd Westby in a company blog post.

Some people, however, are more skeptical of the technology. Dr. Alessandro Acquisti, professor of information and technology at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College, is concerned about potential  security breaches. Three Square Market insists that the chips are encrypted, but Dr. Acquisti explained to the New York Times that encryption “is a pretty vague term which could include anything from a truly secure product to something that is easily hackable.”

The chip is not currently equipped for GPS tracking, but that doesn’t mean Three Square Market won’t add it in the future. Dr. Acquisti worries that the chips could one day track employees’ lunch and bathroom breaks without their permission.

“Once they are implanted,” he warns, “it’s very hard to predict or stop a future widening of their usage.”

This is the first time a U.S.-based company has chipped its employees, but globally, the practice isn’t new. Epicenter, a Swedish startup, tagged its employees with the same technology back in 2015. So far, the program has been successful–Epicenter holds monthly events and parties where specialists can chip employees at no cost.

“People ask me, ‘Are you chipped?’ and I say, ‘Yes, why not,'” said Fredric Kaijser, Epicenter’s chief experience officer, in an interview with CNBC. “And they all get excited about privacy issues and what that means and so forth. And for me it’s just a matter of I like to try new things and just see it as more of an enabler and what that would bring into the future.”

Judging by the high number of volunteers, the workers at Three Square Market are equally willing to “try new things.” Software engineer Sam Bengston signed up right away.

“In the next five or 10 years,” he told the New York Times, “this is going to be something that isn’t scoffed at so much, or is more normal. So I like to jump on the bandwagon with these kind of things early, just to say that I have it.”

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Bad news for doggy day cares. Apparently, they’re breaking the law.

The New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is reinstating a little-known and rarely-enforced regulation. Under that regulation, no resident can board, feed, or groom someone else’s pet for money without a proper license. Those licenses, by the way, cannot be granted to private residences; they are limited to permitted kennels.

Julien A. Martinez, a spokesperson for the Department of Health, said in an emailed statement that the law is meant to protect animals from neglect. “These regulations do not apply to the average New Yorker who may pet sit for friends, family, and neighbors,” he added. In other words, a pet-sitter is not breaking the law if they do not charge or accept money for their services.

The law has been on the books for years, but the Health Department did not enforce it unless they received a complaint. However, the rise of pet-sitting apps such as Rover and Wag have forced the state to take a closer look at violations.

Last October, Health Department general counsel Thomas Merrill sent a letter to Dogvacay.com (which has since merged with Rover), ordering it to confirm that its new users have licenses before signing them up. The site has yet to comply.

In the meantime, the Health Department has started cracking down on unlicensed apartment residents using the app. At least two apartment residences have received violations for caring for pets without a permit. Fines start at $1,000.

Rover, which has over 9,000 registered sitters in New York City, intends to fight the law.

“If you’ve got a 14-year-old getting paid to feed your cats, that’s against the law right now,” Rover general counsel John Lapham told the New York Daily News. “Most places right now continue to make it easier to watch children than animals, and that doesn’t make any sense.”

City Council’s health committee chair Corey Johnson agrees with him, and is reportedly planning to introduce legislation overturning the law.

“There are millions of cats and dogs in New York City, and people I think believe they can pet sit or have someone pet sit for them,” said Johnson. “To have a law on the books that says that’s illegal is antiquated and not practical.”

This is not the first time New York has clashed with emerging “sharing economy” apps. Click here for more on the state’s clash with Airbnb, and here for Uber’s struggles to get a foothold in New York City.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Paid Pet-Sitting Illegal in New York Without License appeared first on Law Street.

Prisoners in White County, Tennessee can now receive a credit for 30 days off their sentences if they voluntarily undergo a birth control procedure.

General Sessions Judge Sam Benningfield signed the standing order instituting the program on May 15. Since then, at least 32 women and 38 men have volunteered for the procedure. Female prisoners receive a Nexplanon arm implant, which works for up to three years. Male prisoners receive a vasectomy. The Tennessee Department of Health conducts both procedures free of charge for the inmates.

Judge Benningfield decided to sign the order after speaking with the Department of Health. He says his hope is that the program will end the vicious cycle of drug-addicted ex-cons giving birth to children they cannot support and who might one day become drug users and criminals themselves. “I hope to encourage them to take personal responsibility and give them a chance, when they do get out, not to be burdened with children,” he said in an interview with Nashville’s News Channel 5. “I understand it won’t be entirely successful, but if you reach two or three people, maybe that’s two or three kids not being born under the influence of drugs. I see it as a win-win.”

Not everyone agrees. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a statement on Wednesday calling the program “unconstitutional:”

Offering a so-called ‘choice’ between jail time and coerced contraception or sterilization is unconstitutional. Such a choice violates the fundamental constitutional right to reproductive autonomy and bodily integrity by interfering with the intimate decision of whether and when to have a child, imposing an intrusive medical procedure on individuals who are not in a position to reject it. Judges play an important role in our community – overseeing individuals’ childbearing capacity should not be part of that role.

There is also dissent closer to home. Tennessee’s District Attorney Bryant Dunaway has instructed his staff not to make arrangements regarding the program. “Those decisions are personal in nature and I think that’s just something the court system should not encourage or mandate,” he told local news station WTKR.

So far, 32 female volunteers have received their implants. The male volunteers are still waiting for their procedures to begin.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Tennessee Inmates Trading Time in Prison for Birth Control and Vasectomies appeared first on Law Street.

On Wednesday, during the White House press briefing, one reporter secretly challenged the standing “no streaming audio or video” rule. Ksenija Pavlovic, founder of the independent news blog Pavlovic Today, used the Periscope app to share the audio of the briefing. She then tweeted a link to the feed:

Join "Audio-only" live streaming of the White House #PressBriefing with Sarah H. Sanders https://t.co/kWRyf4wbAq

— K. Pavlovic (@ksenijapavlovic) July 19, 2017

The feed cut after about 17 minutes, but Pavlovic then tweeted a second link to a 31-minute-long stream. So far, response to the streams has been largely supportive, with social media lauding Pavlovic and lambasting the White House’s restrictive policy.

Thank you for your courage. The White House does not belong to Trump, or any president. It is the people's house. Sanders, et al work for us

— S (@Yes_Its_Me_S) July 19, 2017

https://twitter.com/Elissa_Malcohn/status/887798153361203206

There hasn’t been an on-camera White House press briefing since June 29. Prior to that, Press Secretary Sean Spicer began spending less time in front of reporters, with Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders giving the briefings from June 26 to July 18. President Trump has only had one solo press conference in the six months since he took office. He has been in 10 joint press conference with foreign leaders, but those events typically allow only two questions per leader. In addition, according to CNN, the president has not had a sit-down on-camera interview with any news station other than Fox News or the Christian Broadcasting Network in over two months. Clearly, press communication is not this administration’s priority.

Spicer, however, insists that there is a reason for it. “There are days that I’ll decide that the president’s voice should be the one that speaks and iterate his priorities,” he said during the June 19 “gaggle” (which is this administration’s term for the informal, off-camera briefings). In other words, the president’s voice ought to be the one to which people pay the most attention. It sounds reasonable enough, but given the president’s infrequent interviews combined with the decreasing number of public events in his schedule, the reality becomes that people only get news from the White House in 140-character increments.

More cynical observers suspect another reason for the radio silence: the ongoing war between the Trump Administration and the media. Since taking office, President Trump has tweeted about “fake news” 84 times as of July 20. Most of those correspond with news stories criticizing him or referencing some sort of scandal in his administration. The most recent was in response to media coverage on his conversation with Vladimir Putin during a dinner at the G-20 summit:

The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

The President isn’t alone in his attacks. During the press briefing on June 27, two days before the last televised press briefing, Sanders went on a rant slamming “fake news,” CNN in particular. She was then challenged by Brian Karem of the Montgomery County Sentinel:

Any one of us, right, are replaceable. And any one of us, if we don’t get it right, the audience has the opportunity to turn the channel or not read us. You have been elected to serve for four years, at least; there’s no option other than that. We’re here to ask you questions. You’re here to provide the answers. And what you just did is inflammatory to people all over the country who look at it and say, ‘See, once again, the president is right, and everybody else out here is fake media.’ And everybody in this room is only trying to do their job.

Even when Spicer and Sanders do answer questions, they are extremely limited. The question-and-answer portions of the briefing now average out to around 15 minutes, as opposed to the hour or more they were allotted at the beginning of his term. They have also taken to dodging questions relating to topics that aren’t necessarily beneficial to the administration. For example, when asked if President Trump taped his conversations with former FBI director James Comey, Sanders said that she had no idea. When asked if the president had confidence in his attorney general, Spicer said that he hadn’t had a conversation with him about that. They deferred any questions about the investigation into Russian interference to the president’s lawyer. At one point, after repeating the same answer (talk to the lawyer) five times, Sanders compared the reporters to children. All in all, the atmosphere in the press briefing room has gotten more hostile as of late, which may explain the lack of public access.

There is some good news, though. You may not be able to watch the briefings on TV, but you can still read the transcripts here.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post White House Press Briefings Still Off the Air appeared first on Law Street.

Over the weekend, there was yet another clash between protesters over a Confederate monument. This time, the monument in question was an equestrian statue of General Robert E. Lee, located in Charlottesville, Virginia. On June 5, the Charlottesville City Council voted to change the name of the park where the statue is located from Lee Park to Emancipation Park, following up on its February decision to remove the statue. It was one block away from this location that two separate protest groups squared off: the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan versus a crowd of counter-protesters calling for the statue’s removal. The clash resulted in 22 arrests, according to the Washington Post.

The controversy over the Lee statue in Charlottesville is only the latest in a string of decisions and incidents relating to the removal of Confederate monuments. Read on to learn which statues have been removed so far and what both sides of the debate are saying.

Charleston Shooting Spurs Confederate Flag Debate

The catalyst for this debate was the 2015 Charleston church shooting, in which 21-year-old Dylann Roof killed nine parishioners of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Upon his arrest, Roof admitted to police that the shooting was meant to start a race war. Roof’s manifesto website and Facebook page were also discovered to contain photos of himself posing with several racist symbols, the most prominent being the Confederate flag.

Following the shooting, protesters took to the South Carolina State House in Columbia to demand the removal of the Confederate flag, which had flown on the state house’s grounds since 1961. Several South Carolina legislators supported the flag’s removal, but the cause only received national attention after police arrested 30-year-old Bree Newsome for climbing the flagpole and removing the flag on June 27, 2015. Two weeks later, the legislation passed and the flag was lowered for the final time.

Thousands gathered to watch the flag-lowering ceremony, but not everyone was celebrating. War reenactor Kenneth Robinson and his fellow “soldiers” held a vigil at the state house to “remember the 650,000 casualties of the Civil War,” he told WRAL. “Nine lives matter,” Robinson said referring to the church shooting victims. “All deaths matter, period.”

Cindy Lampley, another reenactor and a descendant of Confederate soldiers, worried that the flag removal would dishonor her relatives. “I think it’s important that we remember them,” she said. “It’s a sad day for me that my ancestors will no longer see their flag flying next to their memorial.”

Which Monuments Have Been Removed So Far?

The debate over the removal of the state house’s Confederate flag has since branched out to include all monuments and memorials to the Confederacy. As opposition grew, state and local lawmakers began to remove several of the Confederate symbols. Here are some recent examples:

New Orleans

Shortly after the Charleston church shooting, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu called for the removal of four Confederate era monuments. The monuments consisted of three statues of Confederate leaders–Lee, General P.G.T. Beauregard, and President Jefferson Davis–as well as a memorial to the Battle of Liberty Place, an 1874 insurrection by the Crescent City White League.

The New Orleans City Council voted to remove all four monuments in 2014, but it wasn’t until April 2017 that the first of them–the battle memorial–was finally removed. The rest of the statues quickly followed suit, and the final Confederate statue of Lee was removed in May. The city replaced the statues of Lee and Davis with public art and a flag, respectively, but has not disclosed plans for the relocation of the actual monuments.

“These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for,” Landrieu said as Lee’s statue was hauled away by crane.

Charlottesville

Aside from voting to change the name of Lee Park and remove its statue, the city council also voted 3-2 last February to change the name of Jackson Park (after General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson) to Justice Park. However, the city is running into unexpected legal trouble.

The Monument Fund, the Virginia Division Sons of Confederate Veterans, and other groups filed a lawsuit against the city in June, claiming that renaming the parks would be illegal. Attorneys also claim that the deed in which the park land was granted to the city specifically states that the park cannot be renamed. The court has not filed an injunction preventing the city from renaming the parks, but the Lee statue will remain in place until a hearing begins next month.

Richmond

Mayor Levar Stoney announced on June 25 that he had charged a 10-member commission with finding ways to contextualize the city’s Confederate monuments. The Monument Avenue Commission has set up a website seeking public input to “make recommendations to the mayor’s office on how to best tell the real story of [the] monuments.” There are no concrete plans currently in place.

Stoney went on to say that he does not support the outright removal of the monuments. “I wish these monuments had never been built, but like it or not they are part of our history in this city, and removal will never wash away that stain.”

Baltimore

Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the former mayor of Baltimore, ordered the city to put up interpretive signs beside the city’s four Confederate monuments. The decision came with less than three months left in Rawlings-Blake’s term. She admitted that it was a “short-term solution.” The city council had previously recommended that the city remove tributes to Lee and Jackson, along with a statue of Roger B. Taney.

The current mayor, Catherine Pugh, told the Baltimore Sun in May that she is exploring the possibility of removing the monuments altogether.

Mississippi

The Mississippi flag incorporates the Confederate flag in its top left corner. Carlos Moore, a black Mississippi resident, says the flag constitutes “state-sanctioned hate speech,” and has taken his grievance all the way to the Supreme Court. Moore intends to argue that the flag is a symbol of racism and violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection for all citizens. In October, the Supreme Court will decide whether or not to take the case.

In addition, the city of McComb and all eight of Mississippi’s public universities have stopped flying the flag. The University of Mississippi announced last week that it will post signs on campus denoting which buildings were built with slave labor.

Washington, D.C.

While the nation’s capital has not removed any Confederate monuments as of yet, Georgetown University renamed two of its campus buildings in April. The move was meant to atone for the university’s ties to slavery. The original names honored two school presidents who oversaw an 1838 sale of 272 slaves to fund the school. The buildings’ new names honor Isaac Hawkins, the slave whose name appeared first in the bill of sale, and Anne Marie Becraft, a 19th-century black educator. The university is also giving admissions preference to descendants of the 272 slaves. Mary Williams-Wagner, one of Hawkins’ descendants, said that the university needed to take further steps, such as identifying all descendants of the slaves sold by Georgetown.

Other colleges, such as Harvard, Duke, Yale, Princeton, and Brown, have also addressed their links to slavery and racism. Last February, Yale changed the name of one of its residential colleges from Calhoun College to Grace Hopper College, honoring a distinguished alumna and a “trailblazing computer scientist.”

Arguments For and Against Confederate Monuments

Opposers

So why remove the monuments? The clearest answer is that they are offensive. The statues honor men who fought for the institution of slavery. Those in favor of removing them argue that the current U.S. government should not condone such motivations, even passively. Confederate symbols also played a role in the Charleston church shooting, proving that they can still be seen as symbols of black oppression and white supremacy. Many people are wary that they will inspire another massacre. A good portion of the country would be much happier if the statues were placed in museums and battlefield parks, away from public property.

Supporters

The other side of the debate is a little more complicated. There are those, like Robinson and Lampley, who believe that removing the monuments would dishonor the memory of the Confederate soldiers who fought and died for what they believed in. There are others who see the Confederacy as Southern heritage, and believe that removing its symbols would be akin to removing it from history itself. Others are wary of a slippery slope, pointing out that Washington and Jefferson, along with 10 other presidents, owned slaves themselves. What would stop the country from removing the statues of its founding fathers?

Conclusion

Racial tensions in this country are running high these days, and the debate over Confederate monuments fits in to that conversation. The statues represent a different era, with different ideals and different ways of life. While the modern world has made tremendous strides toward diversity and inclusion, some of these ideologies still persist. The two schools of thought will inevitably clash, and as long as the monuments stand, the protests and counter-protests will continue.

As for the subjects of the monuments, one in particular had some relevant remarks on the subject while alive. In an 1869 letter declining an invitation to a public meeting concerning the war, Lee wrote:

I think it wiser, moreover, not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the example of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Heritage or Hatred?: The Removal of Confederate Monuments appeared first on Law Street.

Last week, Judge Nicholas Francis of the Family Division in the U.K.’s High Court of Justice ruled that Charlie Gard’s parents had 48 hours to present evidence that experimental treatment will improve their son’s condition. At a subsequent hearing on Thursday, the judge decided that Gard should be evaluated by an American doctor who claims that an experimental treatment may improve his condition.

“I have to decide this case not on the basis of tweets, not on the basis of what might be said in the press, or to the press,” Judge Francis said last week as he gave his initial ruling, alluding to the global interest in the case.

But how has this case garnered so much attention from people in the U.K., people across the world, and even world leaders? Read on to learn more about the Charlie Gard case and the controversy surrounding it.

Who is Charlie Gard?

Charlie Gard, born August 4, 2016, suffers from a rare genetic condition known as mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome (MDDS). It is caused by a mutation in which the cells’ mitochondria stop functioning. More specifically, Charlie has RRM2B encephalomyopathic MDDS, which progresses rapidly and can lead to death within a few months. There is currently no known cure.

Gard developed normally for the first two months of his life, but by mid-October, he was on life support at the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) in London. Today, at eleven months old, Charlie is unable to breathe without a ventilator, open his eyes, hear, eat unassisted, or move his limbs. His heart and kidneys are failing, and he suffers from persistent severe seizures.

What Can Be Done?

His parents, Chris Gard and Connie Yates, want him to undergo an experimental treatment called nucleoside therapy, which has shown some success in treating mitochondrial disease in laboratory mice.

The therapy was used in Baltimore on Arturito Estopinan, a boy suffering from TK2-related mitochondrial depletion system. His father, Art Estopinan, met with Gard and Yates and discussed the treatment. According to him, while the treatment is by no means a cure, Arturito is “getting stronger every day.”

The video below goes into more detail about Estopinan’s treatment.

The treatment has never been used on mice or humans suffering from RRM2B MDDS and it is currently unavailable in the U.K.

According to the family’s GoFundMe page, a doctor in the U.S. accepted Charlie into the treatment program of their own hospital. So far, the family has received over 1.3 million euros in donations to get Charlie to the U.S. and pay for the treatment.

The Court Battle

The doctors at GOSH, however, are opposed to the idea. Although they applied for and received ethical permission to treat Charlie with nucleoside therapy, the baby’s condition had worsened so drastically by that time that they decided against moving forward with the treatment. The view is that his brain damage is too severe for treatment to be of any help, and that it would be kinder to let Charlie die with dignity. Against the parents’ wishes, they planned to take Charlie off life support, court documents show.

In the U.K., when parents and doctors disagree over the treatment of a sick child, the courts step in. Gard’s case went to the High Court, with Justice Francis presiding. On April 11, he ruled, “with the heaviest of hearts” that the hospital “may lawfully withdraw all treatment, save for palliative care,” and that it was in Charlie’s best interest not to undergo the experimental therapy. The Court of Appeals upheld the decision on May 25. The Supreme Court reviewed the case on June 8 but ultimately agreed with the lower court’s ruling. The family’s lawyers then petitioned the European Court of Human Rights, but on June 27, the court rejected the plea and ruled that Charlie’s life support would be turned off on June 30. GOSH later extended the deadline after Gard and Yates posted a video message blasting the hospital for not allowing them to take their son home to die.

The World Weighs In

Before the extension was announced, Pope Francis tweeted a message of support to the Gard family:

To defend human life, above all when it is wounded by illness, is a duty of love that God entrusts to all.

— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) June 30, 2017

There may not have been any names, but papal spokesperson Greg Burke clarified the pope’s meaning the next day by retweeting the message and adding #CharlieGard.

“The Holy Father follows with affection and commotion the situation of Charlie Gard, and expresses his own closeness to his parents,” Burke said in a statement. “He prays for them, wishing that their desire to accompany and care for their own child to the end will be respected.”

In addition, the Vatican-owned Bambino Gesu Hospital in Rome asked to have Charlie Gard transferred there, but representatives from GOSH refused due to legal reasons.

The pope’s tweet may have come as a response to the Pontifical Academy for Life, which put out its own statement three days prior. While supportive of Gard and Yates, the statement, signed by Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, vacillates between middle-of-the-road and sympathetic to the decision of the European Court of Human Rights. “The proper question to be raised […] is this: what are the best interests of the patient? We must do what advances the health of the patient, but we must also…avoid aggressive medical procedures that are disproportionate to any expected results,” the statement reads. The Academy’s words raised eyebrows and ire across the board.

Whether rebuking his fellows or not, the pope is not alone in his support for the family’s efforts. Three days later, on July 3, President Donald Trump weighed in on the case:

If we can help little #CharlieGard, as per our friends in the U.K. and the Pope, we would be delighted to do so.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2017

The tweet brought Gard’s case to America’s attention and raised support among the president’s fellow pro-life conservatives. An unnamed U.S. hospital offered Gard free treatment. Congressmen Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Trent Franks (R-Arizona) have promised to introduce a bill to give Charlie Gard lawful permanent resident status in the United States when Congress returns from recess. Rev. Patrick Mahoney–a pro-life evangelical preacher and president of the Christian Defense Coalition–flew to the U.K. last week as a self-appointed spokesperson for the Gard family. He claims to have met with a senior White House official beforehand and says he is currently keeping President Trump updated on the case.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Theresa May voiced support for the hospital, saying, “I am confident that GOSH have and always will consider any offers of new information that has come forward for the well-being of a desperately ill child.” Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson agrees. In a conversation with his Italian counterpart, Johnson said it is “right that decisions continued to be led by expert medical opinion, supported by the courts.”

Vice President Mike Pence referred to Charlie’s case during an interview on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show on Monday, adding fuel to the fire in an entirely different way. “We hope and pray that little Charlie Gard gets every chance,” he said, “but the American people ought to reflect on the fact that for all the talk on the left about single-payer, that’s where it takes us.”

Back in Court

On July 7, GOSH applied to the High Court for a new hearing in light of other doctors’ claims that the treatment may help Gard. While not changing its views on the treatment or its effect on Charlie, the hospital acknowledged statements made by doctors in the United States and Vatican hospitals and is willing to explore the claims that the treatment would benefit Charlie.

The following Sunday, Gard and Yates presented a 350,000-signature petition urging the hospital to allow their son to travel to the U.S. for treatment.

The July 10 preliminary hearing, prior to Judge Francis’ above ruling, was fraught with emotion, including an outburst from Chris Gard. “When are you going to start telling the truth?” he screamed at the lawyer representing the hospital. At a different point, when his own lawyer reported that a U.S. doctor estimated a 10 percent chance of saving Charlie with the experimental treatment, Yates asked the judge, “You would if it was your son, wouldn’t you?” Judge Francis assured her that he would take that into account during Thursday’s hearing. “I don’t think there’s anyone involved who wouldn’t want to save Charlie,” he added.

Two hours into Thursday’s hearing, there was another altercation between the judge and the parents. When Judge Francis paraphrased the parents’ earlier comments about not wanting their son to live if there were no prospect of improvement, Yates shouted, “I never said that” and reiterated that she did not think Charlie was suffering. She and her husband then stormed out of the courtroom but returned an hour later.

On Friday, Judge Francis said that Dr. Michio Hirano, a specialist in neurology at the Columbia University Medical Center, will evaluate Gard before the court makes its decision. According to  The Mirror, a lawyer for GOSH stated the hospital invited Dr. Hirano to see Charlie back in January, but the visit never happened. In addition, Dr. Hirano reportedly never saw Charlie’s medical records or MRI scans, only summaries. He did, however, claim in his testimony (via video link) that Charlie has somewhere between an 11 and 56 percent chance of improving with the therapy. Judge Francis then determined that Dr. Hirano should travel to the U.K. and assess Charlie in person. He arrived early last week and met with several of Charlie’s GOSH caregivers and other specialists, including a doctor from the Vatican Children’s Hospital.

Judge Francis hopes to give his final verdict by July 25.

Conclusion

What started as one family’s tragedy has become a worldwide phenomenon. A combination of public appeals through social media and support from high-profile individuals has put Charlie and his family in the spotlight. It is difficult to say, though, whether or not this attention will help them in the end. Many cynical observers have wondered if politicians are taking advantage of the Gard family’s situation to push their own agendas. A variety of issues–from health care to government overreach to the right to life–will be shaken by the case’s final verdict. For now, though, Charlie remains on life support, and the world joins his parents in watching over him.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

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